easy peasy cheesy oven baked pasta
ha ha this is the most forgiving dish in the world. you can't go wrong. even a fool like me can do it and afterwards you'll have four or five happy people with a belly full of carbs and if you want you can drink wine and not get sick because your guts are lined with grease and the wine will help break this down and not irritate your stomach lining :)
450g penne cooked al dente and rinsed with cold water 250ml kookroom (20% fat cream) and some milk 250g or more of grated cheese (what australians refer to as 'tasty cheese' ha ha) mustard the kind of mustard depends on the people you're cooking for. if one of them is a thirteen year old girl don't use a hot one. in any case the mustard needs to be just present in the the flavour spectrum, rather like the garlic in houmos.
cover the bottom of a good size ovenproof dish with kookroom and mix well with a couple of generous teaspoons of mustard (can thin with some milk) put in a layer of penne. cover with cheese. put in another layer of penne and top with cheese. add some freshly ground black pepper on top.
cover with aluminium foil or lid and cook for half an hour in a pre-warmed oven at 200 then remove lid or foil (can sprinkle on some breadcrumbs) then another 10 minutes or long enough to let it brown a bit on top.
i'd like to make this for my vegan friends so i'll have to experiment with nut milk (i fear coconut milk might make the flavour too coconutty) and non-diary cheese which is so-so but it's nice not feeling guilty about the exploitation of cows.
if however you feel guilty about serving a meal without any vegetables you can just as easily make a version of this with vegetables in it ha ha. some you can even put in raw, like spinach, mushrooms, capsicum or zucchini (which they call courgettes here) but pumpkin, potato or carrot etc you have to parboil.
or you can serve vegetable soup as a first course, for example, say if someone brought you a very large pumpkin from their garden as mieke did (she also brought a refugee without papers needing a place to stay but that's another story for a different time), my world renowned vegan pumpkin soup which a tasmanian shaman taught me to make in a forest there in 1985 ❤️ and about which almost everyone says the first time they eat it : this is a very thick soup! but they eat it anyway and then they say : this is really good! as if they're surprised. it's super easy to make. drop me a line if you want me to post the recipe.